President Donald (Prince of Orange) Trump’s most popular advisor, Steve Bannon, managed to convince his old bosses at Goldman Sachs to make an incredible investment in a website flogged WoW gold.

Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) collapsed after a year following a huge lawsuit. It existed to launder WoW virtual gold for real cash.

It was set up by former child actor Brock (Mighty Ducks) Pierce in 2001, who liked playing EverQuest eight hours a day. IGE was one of the first sites to allow players in MMOs to trade their virtual goods for real money, and of course, its peak came after the 2004 release of World of Warcraft. IGE was coining it in and Pierce started talking to Bannon in the mid-2000s, and brought him on board to secure IGE some venture capital.

According to Mother Jones Bannon pulled off the deal in 2006, when he managed to persuade former employer Goldman Sachs, plus a consortium of private funds, to invest $60 million in the company. Bannon took a seat on the board for himself, and the investors bought some stock from IGE’s founders.

Next year a World of Warcraft player managed to bring a massive class-action lawsuit against IGE in 2007, accusing them of “substantially impairing” players’ enjoyment of the game. The whole business went tits up.

IGE sold off its marketplace to a competitor and rebranded as Affinity Media, leaving itself as a publisher of MMO community message boards. These days they publish a network of websites and apps in casual gaming and online video.

In June 2007, Affinity’s board knifed Pierce and made Bannon CEO where he stayed until taking over at Breitbart News in 2012.

Following the launch of Battlefield 1 Open Beta, which became available to some today, as well as the launch of World of Warcraft: Legion and some other games, Nvidia has released its newest Geforce 372.70 WHQL driver which promises to bring optimizations for these games and some other fixes.

Available for Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8 and Windows 7 OS in both 64-bit and 32-bit versions, the new driver supports all Nvidia desktop and notebook GPUs since the Fermi-based Geforce 400 series.

According to the release notes, the Geforce 372.70 WHQL driver is primarily a Game Ready driver for World of Warcraft: Legion, Battlefield 1: Open Beta, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and the recently launched Steam version of Quantum Break. The new driver does not add any new SLI profiles but it does add/update 3D Vision profiles for Battlefield 1 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided games.

In addition to providing the optimal experience for that list of games, the Geforce 372.70 WHQL drivers also enable Fast Sync for Maxwell GPUs and the Extended, Clone, and Surround multi-monitor configurations

It also fixes some problems seen in Fallout 4, fixes the high DPC (Deferred Procedure Call) latency after upgrading to Geforce GTX 1080, which is also available for multi-GPU systems and fixes corruption seen when certain SD videos are upscaled to full screen after a driver update.

Blizzard is happy and why shouldn’t they be as World of Warcraft subscriptions are up. The reason for the increase can be traced to the release of the latest expansion pack which was recently released. The latest WOW expansion pack is called Warlords of Draeno and its release has driven subscriptions to 10 million.

Selling over 3.3 million copies of the Warlords of Draenor on the first day alone, growth has been seen in all major territories since release. The numbers do include those players that are using the 1 month free subscription that comes with the expansion pack. WoW subscriptions had climbed to 7.4 million last quarter after being down.

Of course the release of Warlords of Draenor has not been without its problems. Still Blizzard says that they are working around the clock to address them. Owners have been offered free play time as compensation.

A group of 10 Chinese men were sentenced to prison for stealing from a total of 11,500 World of Warcraft accounts. The leader of the group, Chen, bought hacked WoW accounts for a dollar each and emptied them, flogged the resulting gold for an average of $3 per account. One of Chen's accomplices branched out and started his own hacking "studio" to flip WoW accounts. It was so productive he hired several employees.

Chinese coppers investigated and there was an investigation and trial where Chen was found guilty, fined $8,000, and sentenced to two years in prison. The others involved were fined $1,000 and sentenced to just under two years in prison.

Their $10,800 in profits and computer equipment used was also confiscated by the authorities, who had rather a nice Christmas party this year with a WoW theme. Actually, we made that up. It does show that China is getting serious about Online gaming fraud.

Blizzard has confirmed that the fourth expansion pack for World of Warcraft called Mists of Pandaria will be released on Tuesday, September 25th worldwide.

Players will be able to choose between the Standard Edition for $30 or special Collector’s Edition for $60. Players are able to pre-order it from retailers around the world or from Blizzard’s online store.

In addition, players buying the Standard Edition can upgrade to the Digital Deluxe Edition at any time by forking over an additional $10 to upgrade to the digital extras offered by the Collector’s Edition without the other offerings.

If you choose to purchase directly, you can start downloading the content now; but of course it will remain locked till the servers go live on the release date.

Mists of Pandaria has been a mixed bag for Blizzard, as many longtime players of the game have complained about the expansion pack after seeing what Blizzard has shown so far, and commenting that they are not happy with the direction Blizzard opted with this expansion. No matter, most will still buy it even if they don’t like it, and it is doubtful over the long haul that sales will be impacted.

Although something like this was unimaginable even a few years back, Blizzard’s senior WoW producer John Lagrave said that the company has still not given up on delivering its game World of Warcraft to the jolly appletons.

The iOS ecosystem currently offers a WoW Mobile Armory application that lets players view character sheets, use the Auction House and manage guilds. Naturally, this is a mere fragment of the game, but the company is thankfully still far from over.

Lagrave said that developing for mobile is very hard but that the company is always looking into it. He said “Maybe we'll stumble on the great way to put WOW on the phone - maybe we won't, but we're certainly looking into it.”

He said that it would be foolish for any game dev to think handheld but stressed that Blizzard won’t do it until it’s decent. He said that when they get an epiphany, everyone will know "But for now, no epiphany!"

It could be that Blizzard has already settled on the name for the next World of Warcraft expansion pack. If a trademark filing on July 28th means anything, we are pretty sure that the next expansion pack will be called Mists of Pandaria.

If true, it is expected that the next expansion will center on the race known as the Pandarens who really have not been seen all that much in the past, with the exception of being involved in some of Blizzard’s April Fool’s jokes.

Of course, Blizzard has no official comment and why would they at this point? It isn’t even officially announced yet.

Blizzard is experiencing something that they really have not seen before with World of Warcraft, which is a downturn in subscribers. In the satellite TV business and cell phone business this is called subscriber “churn,” and this is something new that Blizzard is dealing with. Blizzard believes that the churn is due in part to WoW players becoming more skilled at the game and not as engaged to ongoing playing once they have completed the latest expansion pack.

To address the issue Blizzard will be speeding up development so that there is not such a long period between expansion packs. By delivering more content to players faster, it is believed that this is the best strategy to keep players engaged and playing the game.

Whether speeding up development means less content per expansion pack, this is anyone’s guess. We suspect, however, that shorter timelines could contribute to less content per expansion pack; but that is unconfirmed and remains to be seen. There is no announcement describing how Blizzard intends to space out the release of these expansion packs, but we expect to hear more about this soon.

Online games such as FarmVille and World of Warcraft are being used by criminals to launder dirty money money, according to New South Wales coppers.

Apparently criminals have discovered that buying and selling virtual items is a growing new way of cleaning dirty money. NSW Police Detective Superintendent Commander Colin Dyson it was a "relatively new" trend provided an "emerging opportunity for criminals".

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, police were looking into how criminals are exploiting that Internet opportunity. Dyson said criminals were using online virtual worlds to communicate and transfer funds around the world.

So if a dwarf comes up to you and offers to flog you a dodgy hammer, or wants you to go on a bank raid which does not involve magic or a dragon you will know why.

World of Warcraft developer Blizzard has apparently reached an agreement with PayPal to put on notice those using PayPal to sell virtual currency for non-virtual currency. Those who continue this practice risk having their accounts irreversibly suspended.

At the center of this seems to be an acceptance by PayPal that these sales violate Blizzard’s intellectual property rights; but some legal experts that we spoke with over the weekend claim that this is nebulous at best and has never really been challenged in court in such a way to assure the eventual outcome.

The move does strike at the heart of the “gold farming” enterprises that have been going on for some time. The results could change things for the better in World of Warcraft, and it seems that players that we spoke with suggest that it is a good move by Blizzard to attempt to curb as much “gold farming” as possible. We will have to see how much success this move will have and only time will tell.